Fractionally African-American but blonde-haired and blue-eyed, Walter White could have lived his life as a white man and never been questioned. Instead, after living through race riots in Atlanta and seeing his family's home nearly burned to the ground as "too good for a nigger family", he always considered himself black. He worked for a few years as an actuarial and salesman for an insurance company, and organized his local chapter of the NAACP after the city's school board announced plans to end public education for blacks after sixth grade. Later he worked for the NAACP national office, and -- posing as a white reporter -- actually attended lynchings, to write the gut-wrenching anti-lynching novel Fire in the Flint. By the best estimates, the American South had more than one lynching per week when White first joined the NAACP, but the book and his activism increased awareness and public condemnation of such savagery until, by the time he retired, lynchings were a rarity.

As a lobbyist, White worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to end discrimination in military and government hiring and equalize education for blacks and whites. He headed the NAACP's court case that forced the University of Missouri to accept blacks at its law school, and he helped lobby the US Senate to block John J. Parker, an outspoken opponent of voting rights for blacks who was nominated by President Herbert Hoover for the Supreme Court.

His daughter, actress Jane White, was a regular on the soap opera The Edge of Night in the late 1960s, appeared in the original Broadway cast of Once Upon a Mattress with Carol Burnett, and had a small role in the film Klute with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. White and his first wife, Leah Gladys Powell White, were divorced after his long extramarital affair with the woman who became his second wife, Poppy Cannon. She was a well-known author of numerous cookbooks and a South African-born Jewish white woman, in a time when mixed marriage was still controversial. After his death, she wrote a book about their marriage, titled A Gentle Knight.

Author of books:The Fire in the Flint (1924)Flight: Voices of the South (1926)The American Negro and His Problems: A Comprehensive Picture of A Serious and Pressing Situation (1927)Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929)A Rising Wind: The Negro Soldier in the European Theatre of War (1945)A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (1948, memoirs)How Far the Promised Land? (1956, published posthumously)